Get in the Ring: (01/26/2018)

Aww yeah time for some wrasslin'.

AW YISS

MOTHA

FUCKIN

WRESTLING GAMES

omg those explosions at the beginning killed me.

I sometimes forget these take awhile to process and get put up, so I've been refreshing and waiting, but AT LAST!

PRE-RUMBLE WRASSLIN'!!

Yay! Wrestling season is here. Royal Rumble to Wrestlemania is the only periode I care about wrestling nowadays.

Alex should check out Wrestle-1. The champion's, Shotaro Ashino, entrance theme is FUEL which is incredibly funny because he is actually very good.

Also their video packages are the best in Wrestling.

love this feature! thanks guys!

ROMAN WINS LOL!

That first game lasted about 32 minutes too long.

I have a crazy idea for Royal Rumble, Daniel Bryans music is playing and Dolph Ziggler comes out. The ultimate troll move.

Of course Dan backs Vince over the Screwjob.

is this a shoot or a work?

For those interested, on the baywatch WCW episode.

@kingbonesaw said:

For a guy like Vince it makes sense he would put business first over someone's words, especially when they had previous with the Women's title defamation.

X-Pac was my favorite wrestler as a kid... I think I'm broken as a wrestling fan.

This might be the best opening 3 minutes of a video ever.

Also I live in Chicago so I am the Chicago Giantbomb office. Please direct all Chicago Giantbomb questions to me, thank you.

I am a little bummed that NXT Takeover Philly did not come up, since it seems like it is going to be a great show like usually, but nevertheless I enjoyed Dan and Alex talking about wrestling because wrestling is always fun to talk about!!

That intro. Video of the weekend

The way I follow NJPW is I follow the NJPW reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/njpw/

They have a monthly schedule and I just follow that schedule.

Great introduction! Love this feature.

Vince McMahon is an awful person and I hope Dan eventually is able to understand just how horrendous he is.

This is such a good format for discussing wrestling

Great to see this again. I have played two of these games a LOT.

1. Brian Clark(e?)/Adam Bomb is definitely still alive.

2. Lee Marshall passed away. I read that one of his last gigs was voicing Tony the Tiger in Frosted Flakes commercials.

3. This may just be something to throw people off, but I caufht a TMZ article claiming Ronda Rousey will be out of thr country this weekend, hence no Rumble for her. They may not even have any deal for her in place anyway.

Nakamura for the men's Rumble, Asuka for the women's Rumble. If not her, either Nia Jax vs. Becky Lynch.

Braun vs. Mix at WrestleMania appeals to me more than what I originally thought would happen, which was Braun vs. Triple H.

I got nothing to say except that this is great and I loved this whole thing.

Once you follow New Japan by watching the big shows for a year or two, it becomes pretty easy to memorize the rough schedule for the year. I think of them just like WWE's PPV schedule.

These are the major shows throughout the year, and all you really need to watch to properly follow the promotion:

January- Wrestle Kingdom

February- New Beginning

March- Anniversary show and New Japan Cup

April- Sakura Genesis (formerly Invasion Attack)

May- Best of the Super Juniors tournament and Wrestling Dontaku

June- Dominion

July and August- G1 Climax tournament

September- Destruction

October- King of Pro-Wrestling

November- Power Struggle

December- World Tag League tournament

There are smaller shows scattered throughout (such as crosspromotional shows with CMLL, ROH, and RevPro), and most of the bigger shows have a tour associated with them that has what are essentially house shows leading to the major event. These "Road to..." shows are for the hardcores and the live audience, and while they can be fun, they are almost always nonessential.

In recent years a lot of the shows have been split off into multiple big shows, like the three upcoming New Beginning shows. They do this for Wrestling Dontaku and Destruction as well. And the tournaments are obviously comprised of a lot of shows, usually all taking place over just a few weeks.

Chaos' thing is that they're final fantasy characters.

Fuck WWE! Its all about XFL!

Needs more Yano.

Wrestling is for jerks.

For about a minute I was really excited for Giant Bomb's new mecha series "Get in the Rig"..

Buy Yano's DVD.

The intro for WCW revenge is incredible.

Dans squeeky croaky thing is weird.

Whooooaaa you guys are being pretty harsh on good old Goldberg here. It's true that he was always very limited in the ring (to put it politely) but he also had an aura and a sort of intensity to him that is still to this day mostly unmatched. That made the undefeated streak consisting mostly of squash matches easy to buy from a fans perspective. It's no coincidence that the crowds got behind him really fast despite him basically coming out of nowhere with this crazy mega push booking.

New name for feature: "Is This Wrestling?"

Big difference between a "person" and an "entertainer/businessman/promoter." When I speak of Vince McMahon, I'm almost always referring to the latter.

@danryckert: I think it's *way* more likely that if Rousey were to debut and win the Rumble, she'd go after Charlotte. I think Asuka takes the title from Bliss at Mania.

@doncabesa said:

Sometimes I'm surprised WWE as a whole gets any coverage at all, considering its political leanings.

Alex's "Nothing about WWE interests me anymore so I just stopped watching" attitude is so refreshing over a lot of the "I hate WWE but I'm gonna keep watching and giving them money while complaining" whining you see on the internet these days. They aren't putting a gun to your head and there is so much other wrestling out there. I've fallen off watching RAW and SD regularly but the PPVs, NXT being damn great again and the ability to watch (literal) shit like a 2000 WCW PPV any damn time I want more than justifies my Network subscription.

@danryckert: Understood, I have a hard time looking past the person with him personally. Also I couldn't give two craps about wrestling but could watch you and Alex talk about it for hours, great stuff.

Guys, wrestlers are literally paid performers following a script, much like actors in a play. If a director told an actor in a play, "I need your character to die in this scene," and the actor just went rogue like "Nah, your script sucks! I'm going to kick his ass instead!" would literally anyone defend that actor? Brett Hart should have just shut his mouth and done as he was told.

Happy to see Chuckie T's "Knife Pervert" tweet rubbing off on other people.

Good stream, looking forward to the eventual All Stars edition. When you guys do that one, make sure you can get the dlc characters up in the mix....assuming they're still available to download.

the intro for this is perfect for wrestling

My mother also has a Brett Hart meeting story. Or actually several. I live in Calgary and about 20 years ago or so my mom worked at a store that had PO boxes (non-post office PO boxes). Hart had a box at that store and mom talked to him many times over a period of a couple years. She didn't have much to say about it other than "he's nice" and "he seems tired all the time".

So the Snes game they played having the Hogan shirts could be because it's almost identical to Super Wrestlemania, which I had, and Hogan was in that.

New Japan Stable Effortpost

So stables in New Japan are a bit different than in the US. New Japan at the least travels together in buses, and so stables are loosely/kayfabe-ly the bus groups and also training groups. So in that way, Goto going from "freelance good guy" to CHAOS made sense--he wanted to train with Okada.

The stables all loosely form the tiers of heel-ness in New Japan, too.

In order from face to heel:

Lion Mark/Taguchi Japan >> CHAOS >> Los Ingobernables de Japon >> Bullet Club >> Suzuki-gun

• All the white-meat babyfaces are individuals outside of the stables--Kushida, Tanahashi, Liger, Tiger Mask, Nagata, Juice Robinson, previously Naito, etc. Taguchi Japan is a loose comedy stable formed around Taguchi, playing around Taguchi being the "manager" ala a soccer national team coach (hence the rest of their getup, including 'numbers'). For multi-man matches he just grabs whoever he can, hence Ricochet and Tanahashi both being involved.
• CHAOS has a fairly long history and convoluted backstory, because they were once heels and are now just kinda the cool good guys. Yano Toru is the bar owner/video segment super producer, hence always having a DVD to sell when he comes to the ring. Okada is the best son. Ishii is the enforcer.
• Los Ingobernables de Japon are heel-ish, but have gotten over incredibly the last year. It taps into a disaffected lower/middle class aspect of Japanese life, which is its own essay, but versus CHAOS they're definitely the heels.
• Bullet Club remain foreign heels, though Kenny is kind of in his own orbit--he's gotten incredibly over as a face, and if he breaks away, he'll go straight to that white-meat babyface area, regardless of how he looks and dresses.
• Suzuki-gun (gun pronounced "goon," because it's Japanese for 'army') are the arch heels. They are bad guys. Minoru Suzuki is the angriest man in the world, this weekend broke Tanahashi in half and has the greatest entrance theme in pro wrestling. Taichi is annoying, TAKA Michinoku is amazing, Lance Archer is alright but David Hart Smith is a giant walking steroid.

New Japan in general is much more sports-style, is completely focused on references and gimmicks that play to Japan, and only recently have been subtitling and posting the relevant backstage interviews. But if you're tired of WWE's bullshit, New Japan is amazing. NJPW World is a better subscription than WWE Network.

Thanks for doing this guys. As a longtime wrestling fan whose fandom has been relegated to the Rumble/Mania and some NXT events only (as that's as much of the current product I can stomach) this is appreciated. Don't make it too infrequent!